An Idea on How to Save Your Hometown Paper
February 20th, 2009 by Julia Taylor
How to monetize a newspaper today?
buymke with mymke
Play to the consumer. Retail advertising is the lifeblood of print institutions. So when the retail market shifts to the variety and ease of an Amazon.com, how does local print media compete? Throw in a very nasty recession, over-leveraged companies and many newspapers are circling the drain fast. The daily edition of the New York Times now costs more than a share of NYT stock.
Consumers today are starting to get the connection between local jobs, local companies and local products for a number of reasons. Unemployment is escalating at an amazing pace. People want better customer service and there is a newfound loyalty to buying local. This recession is teaching all of us Economics 101 again in a very painful basic civic lesson.
Newspapers can be the link that provides the retail rally locally. They can provide the local personality behind the retail façade; easily help consumers find deals and products locally, help local retailers know what customers want and stimulate the local economy with a buy local approach.
So here’s my idea. If newspapers could take the Amazon and Pandora approach to local retailers and aggregate every single bit of local retail they could find into an easy to navigate website and app, I would buy more locally. This is partially, because I get Economics 101 and also because I like a little personality behind the storefront where I spend my money. I get better service. I keep local Milwaukeeans in jobs and I get more customized choices in the end run. The newspapers could be the digital catalogues for local retailers.
I like people. I like economically supporting someone who took the risk to start a store or a business and believes in this community. Some like Will Allen are a 20-year overnight success and others just do the right thing by their customers and their employees until the bitter end. And in Milwaukee, I’m not alone in this discussion about supporting our neighbors.
I think about all the books I bought at Amazon because it was easy and how it connects with the fact that Schwartz Bookstores is closing. I made some choices and so did Schwartz’s. It’s a sign of the times that CEO Reads is the surviving part of the Schwartz’s legacy.
There were too many times I physically went first to Schwartz’s for the book I wanted and they offered to have it here within a week. I would go home and order it online and get in 48 hours-and usually cheaper.
I remember last summer trying to find local places that had hammocks and patio heaters. I bought locally but only after running around with unhappy grandkids in the back seat!
(They loved the hammock but not the acquisition process.) This fall I tried to find a local hardware store with simple cheap containers for storing vegetable and stock products. I could find everything all over the world at Amazon in a few seconds but nothing easily locally.
What if newspapers could save the local retail market and themselves in the bargain?
Think about the long tail approach to marketing products-this how the idiosyncratic stores and products that define a community survive and you have consumers that testify about how special Milwaukee is with hobby shops, farmer’s markets and boutiques. This how you build a local economy.
I would love a website or an app that I could find items locally. It can’t be based on who advertises to aggregate the data. Advertising is completely at the mercy of the consumer’s viewpoint and comfort to survive. We need every single item available locally to show up on a relevant search. When that happens, the clicks will be worth their weight in gold.
The loyalty can easily be built and this is the time to do so but somehow we have to bridge the gap between ink and click.
I find that generally reporters are early adapters and they are blogging, twittering and fairly successful with social media. The marketing departments and old line marketing agencies have not made the shift and often respond that they have “one of those” social marketers but they are not leveraged or linking traditional marketing with social media effectively.
If the local advertising/ marketing media can’t figure it out, Amazon or Google will. Or maybe one of those social media young people hanging out at Bucketworks will. For Milwaukee’s sake, I hope it’s our local media in conjunction with the IP at Bucketworks. And if our local media decides to check it out, give me call. I know how you can invest in our local economy as well with young social media entrepreneurs who have the ideas and know how to build the apps and behavioral metrics that just might create that new business model. If we don’t hire them, Google and Amazon well. They are here because they love Milwaukee, they have young families and they grew up here.
Let’s return a little of the love.
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